Day 4: Fear

Today’s objective: Recognise the role of fear in promoting a sex negative environment.

Today we are looking at the second powerful tool used to promote and maintain a sex negative environment: fear. Of course, you’d be right in saying that shame is also often a particular type of fear (that is to say, fear of negative judgement by others). But sex negative societies also often use more overt fear appeals when it comes to maintaining their ideas of what is the “right” kind of sex, and the wrong kind of sex. It is important to remember that fear can also be used to maintain the ‘correct’ frequency of sex, which is a sign of sex negative societies: that is to say fear can be used both to increase and decrease sexual frequency as well as type of sex, depending on who uses it.

The most obvious examples of this approach are ‘sex education’ programmes promoting abstinence, often… [End of preview]